I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

  And so I became a waiter on the floor under the guidance of the headwaiter Mr. Skřivánek, and there were two other waiters, but I was the only one allowed to lean against the table in the alcove when things slowed down in the early afternoon. The headwaiter told me that I’d make a good headwaiter but that I had to train myself to fix a guest in my memory as soon as he came in and be aware when he was leaving—not necessarily at lunchtime, when a customer would have to pick up his coat from the cloakroom, but in the afternoon, when meals were served in the café and the cloakroom was closed—so that I would learn to spot those who wanted to sneak out without paying. I was also supposed to be able to estimate how much money a guest had with him, and whether he would spend accordingly, or should spend accordingly. That, Mr. Skřivánek said, was what being a good headwaiter meant. And so when there was time for it he would quietly describe to me what sort of guest had just arrived or was just leaving. He trained me for several weeks, until I felt ready to try it on my own. I would look forward to the afternoon as though I were setting out on some adventure, and I’d be as excited as a hunter waiting for his quarry to appear. The headwaiter would either smoke, his eyes half closed, and nod contentedly, or he would shake his head, correct me, and then go to the guest himself and show me that he’d been right, and he always was. And that was how I first found it out, because when I asked the headwaiter a basic question—How do you know all this?—he answered, pulling himself up to his full height, Because I served the King of England. The King? I said, clapping my hands. You mean you actually served the King of England? And the headwaiter nodded his head in satisfaction. And so the second phase of my training began. It was exciting, something like the lottery, when you’re waiting to see if your number will come up, or hoping to win the door prize at a masquerade ball or some public celebration. A guest would come into the restaurant in the afternoon, the head-waiter would nod, we’d go into the alcove, and I’d say, Italian. The headwaiter would shake his head and say, Yugoslav, from Split or Dubrovnik. And we’d look each other in the eye for a moment, then nod, and each put twenty crowns on a tray in the alcove. I would go to ask what the guest wanted, and when I’d taken his order, and was on my way back, the headwaiter would see my expression, sweep up both twenty-crown notes, and slip them into his enormous wallet, for which he’d had one of the pockets in his trousers bordered with the same kind of leather, and I’d be astonished and ask, How did you know that? And he’d answer modestly, I served the King of England. And so we’d bet like that, and I’d always lose. But then he said that if I wanted to be a good headwaiter I had to be able to recognize not just the nationality but also what the guest was likely to order as well. So when a guest came into the restaurant, we’d nod, go into the alcove, and lay our twenties on the sideboard, and I’d say, Goulash soup or the tripe-soup special. The headwaiter would say, Tea and fried toast, no garlic. Then I’d go for the order and say, Good morning and what would you like? And the guest would say, Tea and fried toast, no garlic, and as I walked back the headwaiter was already scooping up both twenties, and he’d say, You have to learn to recognize a gallbladder case when you see one. Just take a look at him. His liver is probably doomed as well. Another time, I thought the guest would have tea with bread and butter, and the headwaiter said, Prague ham with a pickle and a glass of Pilsner beer, and of course he was right, and when I’d taken the order and was coming back with it, the head-waiter saw me coming, raised the little window, and called the order into the kitchen for me: One Prague ham. And when I got there, he added, And a pickle on the side. I was glad to be learning, even though I wasted all my tips, because we bet whenever we could and I’d always lose, and each time I asked him how he knew, he’d slip the twenties into his big wallet and say, I served the King of England.

  So there I was in Karel’s place. I thought of Zdeněk, the headwaiter who liked waking up a whole village and spending all his money like a bankrupt aristocrat, and then I thought, for the first time in a long time, of the maître d’ from the Golden City of Prague, my first maître d’, Malek was his name. He was incredibly stingy and no one knew where he kept his money, though everyone knew he had a lot of it and was saving up for a little hotel of his own, and that when he retired he would buy or rent a hotel somewhere in the Bohemian Paradise district. But the truth was quite different, because once we got drunk at a wedding and he grew very sentimental and confessed that eighteen years ago his wife had sent him with a message for a friend of hers, and when he rang the doorbell and the door opened, there stood a beautiful woman who blushed, and so did he as they both stood there in the doorway thunderstruck. She was holding some embroidery, and he went in and didn’t say a word but put his arms around her while she went on embroidering, and then she slipped down onto the couch and went on embroidering behind his back while he took her like a man—those were his words. From then on he was in love and saved his money, a hundred thousand crowns in eighteen years, so that when he left his family, his wife and children, they would have some security. He would buy them a little house and then, though his hair was gray, go find happiness with his gray-haired beauty. After he told me all this, he unlocked his writing desk and showed me the hundred-crown notes he had stashed away to buy his happiness with, and looking at him I never would have guessed it, because one of his trouser legs was hiked up and he was wearing old-fashioned long underwear that came down to his ankle and was tied there with white lace sewed inside the cuff of his trouser leg. It was underwear straight out of my childhood, when I lived with my grandmother in the mill where the traveling salesmen would fling their underwear out of the window of the Charles Bath, the very same kind of long underwear that had once hung for a moment in the air. So each of the headwaiters was different, and Malek from the Golden City of Prague suddenly appeared to me, alongside the headwaiter of the Hotel Paris, like a saint of some kind, like the painter and poet Tonda Jódl who sold The Life of Jesus Christ and was forever putting his jacket on and taking it off again, covered with powder from his medicine, and with his mouth stained yellow from drinking Neurastenin. And I wondered what kind of headwaiter I would make. Now it was I who served the brokers every Thursday, because Karel never came back. Like all rich people, the brokers were as cheerful and playful as puppies, and when they closed a deal they would throw their money around like butchers who’d won at cards. Of course, butchers who played cards would occasionally lose their shirts and get home three days later minus their buggy, minus their horses, minus the livestock they’d bought, with nothing left but a whip. Sometimes these brokers would lose everything too, and then they’d sit in the private chambers looking at the world like Jeremiah watching Jerusalem burn. Gradually I gained the confidence of the young ladies who waited in the café until the exchange closed and then went down to the private chambers, and it didn’t matter whether it was eleven in the morning or late afternoon or dusk or late at night, because at the Hotel Paris the lights were always on, like a chandelier you’ve forgotten to switch off. Best of all I liked the private chambers the young ladies called the Clinic, or Diagnostics 100, or the Department of Internal Medicine. The brokers who were still at the height of their virility would try to get the women tipsy as fast as possible, then slowly remove their blouses and skirts until they were rolling around with them on the upholstered couches and chairs as naked as God made them, and the brokers would end up completely worn out, so exhausted from making love in unusual positions that they looked as if they’d just suffered a heart attack. But in the Department of Internal Medicine or Diagnostics 100 things were merrier. Entertaining the older gentlemen was the most popular job, because this was where the girls raked in the most. The older brokers would laugh and make jokes and treat the undressing of a young woman as a collective game of strip poker, removing her clothes little by little, right on the table, while they sipped their drinks from their crystal champagne glasses and savored the bouquet. The girl would then lie back on the table, and the old brokers would gather around he
r with their glasses and plates of caviar and lettuce and sliced Hungarian salami, and they’d put on their spectacles and study every fold and curve of her beautiful female body, and then, as if they were at a fashion show or a life-study class in some academy of art, they’d ask the girl to sit, or stand up, or kneel, or let her legs dangle from the table and swing back and forth as though she were washing them in a stream. These brokers would never worry or argue among themselves about who had what part of her body closest to them, but their animation was like the animation of a painter transferring what excites him in a landscape to his canvas, and so these old men would peer through their glasses at the crook of an elbow, a strand of loose hair, an instep, an ankle, a lap, and one would gently part the two beautiful cheeks of her behind and gaze with childish admiration at what was revealed, and another would shriek in delight and roll his eyes to the ceiling, as if thanking the Lord Himself for the privilege of peering between the open thighs of a young woman and touching whatever pleased him most with his fingers or his lips. This private chamber was always filled with light, not only with the strong light from the ceiling funneling down through a parchment lampshade but also with the glitter of wineglasses and four pairs of spectacle lenses moving back and forth like tiny veiled fish in an illuminated aquarium. When they had had their fill of looking, the brokers would call it quits and pour the young woman some champagne, and she would sit on the table and drink toasts with them, and they would call her by her first name, and she could help herself to anything she wanted from the table. The older men made jokes and were courteous to her, while from the other chambers you could hear raucous laughter, sometimes suddenly silenced, and I often felt the urge to barge in there, certain I’d find a dead body or a dying broker lying on the floor. Then my old men would dress the young woman, like running a movie backward, and dress her just the way they had undressed her, with none of the apathy that comes afterward, none of the indifference, but with the same courtesy they had shown her from the start. When they left, one of them would always pay the whole bill, they would tip the head-waiter, and I always got a hundred crowns, and they would leave, glowing and at peace with themselves, full of beautiful images that would last them a week. By next Monday they would be looking forward to examining a different woman on Thursday, because they never had the same woman twice, perhaps in order to spread their reputation among the Prague prostitutes. At the end of each session, the young woman they had just examined would hang around the private chamber, waiting, breathing heavily, eyeing me greedily as if I was a movie actor, because she was so aroused she couldn’t bring herself to leave. So after I finished clearing the table and put away the last piece of cutlery, I’d have to finish what the old men began. The women would throw themselves on me with such passion and eagerness, it was as if they were doing it for the first time, and for those few minutes I felt tall and handsome and curly-haired, and I knew that I was king for those beautiful young women, though it was only because their bodies had been so tickled by eyes, hands, and tongues that they could scarcely walk. Not until I felt them climaxing once, twice, would they come to life again, their eyes would return, the glassy absent stare of passion would disappear, and they would see things normally again. Once more I became a tiny waiter, standing in for someone strong and handsome, performing on command every Thursday with increasing appetite and skill. This had been the specialty of Karel my predecessor, who had the aptitude and the capacity and the love for it, though I had that too. And I must have been good in other ways as well, because all the young women would greet me when they met me, in the hotel or on the street, and if they were a long way off they’d bob or wave their hankies or their purses, and if they had nothing in their hands, they’d at least give me a friendly wave, and I’d bow or acknowledge them with a wide sweep of my hat, then stand straight again and raise my chin, feeling taller than my double-soled shoes could make me.

  And so I started setting more store by myself than I should have. When I had time off, I would dress up, and I fell in love with neckties, the kind of ties that really make the clothes, which in turn make the man. I bought myself the same kind of ties our guests had, but that wasn’t enough for me, because in my mind I kept opening the door to the hotel closet hung with clothes and things that guests had left behind. I had never seen anything, anywhere, like the ties in that closet, ties with small name tags attached to them by thin thread, one belonging to Alfred Karniol, a wholesaler from Damascus, another to Salamon Pihovaty, the director of a company from Los Angeles, a third to Jonathan Shapliner, who owned spinning mills in Lvov, and a fourth and a fifth, and there were dozens of ties, and I longed to have one of that class and wear it someday, and it was all I could think of. I had it narrowed down to two, a metallic blue one and a dark red one made of the same kind of material as the blue one. They both shimmered like the wings of rare beetles or butterflies, and with a summer jacket, one or two buttons undone, one hand in my pocket and a fine tie hanging from my neck to my waist, I would be admired by everyone. When I tried the red tie on in front of a mirror, I could see myself walking down Wenceslaus Square and along Národní, and the other pedestrians, most of them elegantly dressed, stopped in their tracks, startled by my beautiful tie, and I strolled by with my jacket unbuttoned so all the connoisseurs could see it. So I was standing before the mirror in the attic of the Hotel Paris, slowly undoing the shiny red Bordeaux necktie, when another one caught my eye, one I’d never noticed before. There was my tie! It was white and seemed to be made of an unusual rough fabric covered with small blue dots, light blue, like forget-me-nots, and though those dots were part of the weave, they looked as if they’d been stuck on and glittered like sparks struck from an anvil. A tiny tag hung from the thread, which said the tie had been left behind by Prince Hohenlohe. When I put it on and saw myself in the mirror, I felt some of Prince Hohenlohe flow from his tie to me, and I put a little powder on my nose and on my freshly shaved chin, walked out of the restaurant, and paraded up and down Pfikopy, looking into the shopwindows. And it turned out just the way I’d seen it in the attic mirror. But it wasn’t the money, because almost everyone who wore a special tie and beautifully tailored clothes and suede shoes and carried an umbrella like an English lord had money, but no one had a tie like mine. I entered a men’s haberdashery, and the minute I walked in the door I was the center of attention, or rather the tie was. I asked to see several pairs of muslin shirts, which I examined carefully, and then to add some polish to my appearance I asked the saleswoman to choose for me one out of their dozen white handkerchiefs and arrange it in my breast pocket the way it was supposed to be worn those days. She laughed and said, You can’t be serious, you tie your necktie so beautifully. And she took a handkerchief—and I finally saw how it was done, because I had never been able to get it right—and spread it on the table and picked it up lightly in the middle with three fingers as if taking a pinch of salt from a saltcellar, and she shook it gently to make beautiful pleats, then drew the pleats through her other hand, folded the bottom under, tucked it into my breast pocket, and teased the corners into place. I thanked her, paid the bill, and was given two parcels, a beautiful shirt and five handkerchiefs, both tied with golden cord. Next I went into a shop selling men’s suit fabrics, and my white necktie with its blue dots and my white handkerchief with its cone-shaped folds and corners as sharp as the points of a curled linden leaf drew the attention not only of the salesmen but also of two well-dressed gentlemen, who were staggered when they saw me, because their confidence in their own ties and handkerchiefs was shaken. Then I looked at some material for a suit, though I didn’t have the money for it with me, and I chose an Esterházy, an English cloth, and asked them to take it outside so I could examine it in sunlight. They saw at once that I was a customer who knew his fabrics, and the salesman carried the whole bolt outside for me and flipped back the corner so I could judge for myself how my future suit would look in the city streets. I thanked him and then hesitated awkwardly, but the sa
lesman reassured me that it was quite all right to take my time deciding, tomorrow was another day, I could buy this material any time, and the firm of Heinrich Pisko was assured of my business since it was the only one in Prague that carried this material. I thanked them and walked out and crossed the street, cocking my head slightly and furrowing my brow to make myself look distinguished and thoughtful. Then something happened that convinced me the necktie had changed me a lot, because along came Véra, who’d been in the Department of Internal Medicine only last Thursday. She saw me, and I could tell she was about to give me a friendly wave with her purse and white gloves, but suddenly she stopped, as if she wasn’t quite sure now that it was me, the one who’d had to give himself to her so she could leave the hotel and go home after the old men had got her so excited. So I pretended I was someone else, and she turned to look back at me and then walked on, certain she’d made a mistake, and it was all because of the necktie and handkerchief. At Prašná Brána I crossed the street again, so I could walk back along Pfikopy, and just as I was congratulating myself on my outfit, who should I see coming toward me, his hair like a white lambskin cap, but the headwaiter Mr. Skřivánek, but he wasn’t looking at me though I knew he’d seen me. As he walked past, I stopped as if he’d greeted me, and turned to look after him, and Mr. Skřivánek stopped too, turned around, and walked back to me. When he looked into my eyes, I realized that all he had seen of me was a white tie walking down Pfikopy, and the headwaiter, who knew everything, looked at me as if to say he knew where I’d got the tie, that I’d borrowed it without permission. And as he looked at me, I said silently to myself, How did you know all this? And he laughed and replied out loud, How do I know? I served the King of England. And he went on walking down Přikopy. The sun was shining, but now it seemed to turn dark, and I felt like a lamp whose wick the headwaiter had turned down, or an inflated tire whose valve he had loosened. I could hear the air hissing out of me as I walked along, and I felt that I was no longer lighting my own way, and that the tie and the handkerchief had wilted like me and were limp, as if I had just run through the rain.